Starling Travel

When I was looking through my grandma’s old family photos, I found this one.

None of the people so eagerly approaching this bear are any of my ancestors, but my grandma was close enough to TAKE the photograph, so I can’t brag too loudly about how safe she might have been. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, visitors to Yellowstone park were allowed to approach and feed the grizzly bears. I wonder how many human injuries occurred before they changed that rule.

Now, when a grizzly bear wanders into an area of Yellowstone with lots of tourists, the rangers are right there to prevent encounters. Here’s a video of a grizzly bear at Old Faithful, chasing bison.

I LOVE how that video ends. He realizes that the grizzly is coming for him and he starts yelling, “Nope, no, no!” Then the video just STOPS! AWESOME!

I’ve seen bears in Yellowstone before and wrote about it here:

• Starling Travel – Yellowstone Grizzly Bear Photos
• Starling Travel – Video: Bear in Yellowstone

Here’s the video from our 2007 encounter:

It’s funny to me to see my videos and photos alongside the one from my grandma’s collection. Throughout the years, our family has visited Yellowstone many times and have enjoyed the wildlife there. It’s like I feel connected to her across the span of time and it has even bridged across death itself, creating a bond from beyond the grave.

Ask A Mortician visited Savannah and she talks about its ghosts and famous graveyards. She usually talks about death and our inevitable mortality, so even on her vacation, she talks about her profession.

I love how she categorizes the city:

Savannah is no doubt a city of death. It saw battles in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and a yellow fever epidemic that wiped out a thousand people in a week. Geographically, it’s not that big. You can’t swing a dead cat without landing on some paved-over 200-year-old burial, but does being on all those dead people really necessarily ghosts and hauntings and angry spirits, or could the whole city just be a Momento Mori? A reminder that we, too, will die and while there are dead people underneath our feet, we’re alive. ALIVE!

When we were in Savannah, we didn’t have much time to take ghost tours. We were there with Mike’s family because his grandfather flew in WWII on a B-17 for the Mighty Eighth Air Force. The museum for that bomb group is in Savannah.

• National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force

We spent a lot of time at that museum and they are currently in the process of restoring a B-17 to its former glory, so it proves to be an even BETTER museum once that is done.

I’d really like to revisit Savannah and see that museum again, but this time, I’d also like to take some home tours and ghost tours. Oh, and don’t forget the Savannah Candy Kitchen! How I loved those candied pecans! THAT is a perfect way to celebrate being ALIVE!

Sci Show investigates the Waitomo Caves in New Zealand, which glow a strange hue of blue. And the reason they do is because of weird glow worms!

New Zealand is one of those places that I really want to visit and when I do, I’ll be sure to see the Waitomo Caves. Until then, here is a video showing them in person.

Throughout Disneyland (and apparently Disney World) there are Kodak Picture Spot signs there to show you cool places to take a picture of yourself. I don’t quite think they meant them to be used like Wil Wheaton used them this last trip.

• another batch of pictures from disney worldWIL WHEATON dot NET | WIL WHEATON dot NET

Despite the lack of scenery, his collection of photos made me laugh and were interesting in their own right. Each land in Disney World has a different font for its Kodak Picture Spot sign. The fact that Wil and Anne just took a picture of the sign with Wil goofily smiling for the camera just makes me laugh!

Click on over to Wil’s website and check out his entire collection of photos!

• another batch of pictures from disney worldWIL WHEATON dot NET | WIL WHEATON dot NET

Update 12-14-14

I finally fixed this awning and made it much more sturdy and easy to put up. You can see it here:

• Starling Travel – A Better Homemade Awning

A couple of weeks ago, we went camping down at Sand Hollow State Park in Southern Utah. It was the first time I got to test my homemade awning. It looked GREAT!

Unfortunately, it didn’t hold up well in the wind. Just a short burst of wind sent it toppling down. There are two points of weakness in my design: the connections at the top and the connections at the trailer. On the trailer, the poles (stolen from my Springbar tent) just slide onto this PVC connector.

They worked great in the garage, but there was no wind there. Even the smallest of wind gusts can pop the pole off this connector, so I need to drill a hole in both the pole and the PVC pipe, and add a pin to keep the poles in place.

At the top of the awning, it is held on with a pin, but the pin just kept popping out of place, so I need a different connection there as well. I did a pretty good job sewing the awning, so I’m proud of that. All I need to work on is the hardware and this puppy with look good AND stay in place.

There is so much awesome going on in this photo from URTrekking, that you really have to click through to the full-sized image to fully enjoy it.

• Untitled By UrTrekking – Full Size Image on Flickr

From the canoe to the SpringBar tent, this photo is like stepping into a camping trip. It was taken in Marion, Pennsylvania, probably at Bald Eagle State Park. I can just imagine them canoeing on Foster Joseph Sayers Lake.

The next time you are feeling trapped at work, take a moment and really let yourself step into this photograph. Take a deep breath and smell the damp air blowing off the lake. Relax in the chairs or take a nap in the tent. After just a few minutes imagining yourself into this photo, you’ll feel refreshed and ready to tackle the day anew!

This old Home Movie of DisneyLand in 1956 from Jeff Altman really made me happy to see.

He said:

Shot by my grandfather on his Bell & Howell Filmo using 16mm Kodachrome film stock. This footage was taken a year after the California theme park opened.

It was quite a surprise going through this and seeing my grandmother meeting Walt Disney himself! (Continue Reading…)

Sci Show featured Göreme National Park in Turkey. Known for its strangely shaped rock formations, it is one of those truly weird places to visit in this wide world.

Rock formations have been sculpted in a wide variety of shapes by weather and wind, as shown here in a screen shot from Sci Show.

For more information:

• Göreme on Wikipedia
• Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia
• Images of Göreme National Park

Retronaut posted an awesome photo of Disneyland’s backstage cafeteria from 1961.

I love seeing Snow White with a lunch tray. Right behind her is a spaceman and to the right is a cowboy. It’s all that I love about Disneyland all wrapped up in one photo!

I love Yellowstone and I’ve talked about it many times over the years. One of my favorite features is the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which is a sadly neglected part of the park. Because the area is only open a couple months of the year, Mike and I have only been able to see it every other year (or so). We usually visit in late April and that time of the year is a crap shoot for Yellowstone. Sometimes we are buried in ten feet of snow.

Sometimes we enjoy sunshine, warm days and grizzly bears.

Whenever we CAN visit the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, we do, and it never disappoints.

Here is a video from RV Geeks about it.

Just like all videos of majestic natural phenomena, it’s impossible to capture the grandeur of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone on video, yet people rarely talk about it when they come back from a visit. When it has to compete with huge jets of boiling water that shoot hundreds of feet into the air on a schedule, the loveliness and shocking size of the falls kind of gets lost.

The next time you visit Yellowstone, make sure you schedule it during the time of the year that the road to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is open and accessible. It’s worth juggling your time in order to see it live and in person.

Map info:

• Lower Falls on Google Maps